My subject is journalism and its role in Canadian public life. I
hope to indicate how it has developed in response to the
requirements of the Canadian people, and how in turn it has
affected the people. I want also to place Canadian journalism
within a historic and global context, and suggest how its history
parallels journalism in certain other countries, including Japan.
In Canada we are perhaps especially conscious of these
issues--first, because we traditionally regard journalism as
responsible for creating and sustaining the national community,
above all through national broadcasting; and second, because at the
University of Toronto from the 1940s to the 1970s, Harold Innis and
then Marshall McLuhan developed theories of mass communications
that influenced this field of study throughout the world. Innis,
in his book Empire and Communications, described how mass media
make large societies possible by shrinking distances. McLuhan,
whose career at Toronto overlapped Innis's, wrote that his own
book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, was a footnote to Innis. They were the
first scholars who placed communications at the centre of history,
arguing that we can best understand a civilization by studying the
way it explains itself to itself, whether it uses papyrus scrolls
or printing or television. They argued that each of these media,
and many others, has its own properties and produces its own unique
effects. Those of us who have studied their work remain attentive
to the nature of mass communications, and in particular to the way
the medium we use affects the information we try to deliver--as
McLuhan's famous phrase summarizes it, "the medium is the message."
In my own case, the experience of interviewing Marshall McLuhan
many times, and writing about him even more often, as well as
reviewing his books as they appeared, was permanently influential.

My own life in journalism began in 1950, so I have seen our
profession through several major changes. If I compare journalism
in mid-century Canada with Canadian journalism as the 20th century
comes to a close, the most striking difference is not in style or
quality but in quantity. There is now far more of it than there
was in 1950; I estimate that in Canada the number of journalists
has multiplied about ten times, much faster than the population,
and the amount of news available has grown at least as fast.
Television began in Canada in 1952 and has been expanding ever
since, and during the same years radio has devoted more attention
to news. The rise of what we might call "direct coverage" has been
especially significant. At the middle of the century hardly anyone
in Canada had seen the federal parliament at work, had watched a
provincial legislature, seen a national commission of inquiry, or
heard an argument before the Supreme Court of Canada. Few had
witnessed a press conference given by a national politician. Today
all of those experiences are routinely available through
television. And of course official documents are distributed to
the public through the Internet, so that someone who writes a
report or delivers a significant policy speech does not have to
rely entirely on the newspapers and the broadcasters to spread the
message.

Meanwhile, the print media, newspapers and magazines, remain active
and lively. And the Internet, as well as being a marvellous
research tool for those who use it carefully, has also become a
source of news for a small but growing number of citizens.

To me, the great surprise in all this has been the public's
insatiable desire for news. No matter how much news we give them,
they remain willing to receive still more. There was a humbling
lesson for me when Ted Turner started his Cable News Network in
Atlanta in 1980. That was the year Marshall McLuhan died, and it
happened also to be the year Ted Turner moved the world a step
closer to the status of global village that McLuhan had predicted.
I didn't at first understand the implications. CNN seemed to me an
interesting experiment, but certainly not a major event in
journalism. Of course, I was dead wrong. CNN set the pace for all
subsequent television news around the world. In Canada it inspired
our first 24-hour cable news service in the late 1980s. We have
three now, and more to come. The Americans have seven or eight of
them. In late 1997, it is hard to imagine the world without
24-hour news.

Now, it's worth reflecting that the very idea of news as a
commodity and a profession is only about 150 years old. No matter
how great the changes we have observed in recent news coverage,
these changes are minor when compared with the invention of news
itself. In the 19th century, by starting to produce daily
newspapers, our predecessors reshaped the way humanity thought
about events. Each day, journalists broke off a piece of history,
put it on newsprint, and sold it to the public. Within a few
decades, they created a new human habit, newspaper reading. Many
years later, Marshall McLuhan pointed out that in a sense the
newspapers invented a new environment which people entered when
they picked up a paper. As he put it, "People don't actually read
newspapers. They get into them every morning like a hot bath."
They immersed themselves in this new world of news. By the late
19th century many people came to feel they absolutely needed
something that their grandparents had never imagined having:
knowledge of what had happened across the country during the
previous 24 hours.

In Canada as in Japan, the newspapers of the 19th century began as
blatant political propaganda. Political parties helped create them
and sometimes owned them. Their clear purpose was to influence
voters and encourage the supporters of the parties. News coverage
was extremely biased, and no one expected it to be otherwise. The
idea that newspapers should be "objective," that they should fairly
report on all sides of a public issue--this idea had not yet been
born. People read newspapers that expressed their politics. On
the street in Canada you could identify someone's party by the
newspaper he was seen carrying. Today's newspapers have political
opinions, but readers expect them to give a reasonably fair account
of other positions. And readers choose their newspapers not by
politics but by the tone and intellectual level of the paper, and
of course by the information it contains. They may also choose it
for features that journalists regard as unimportant.

In the winter of 1963, all the newspapers in New York City were
closed down by a strike. I went there to discover what life was
like without newspapers, and as a reporter and writer I came back
with a somewhat humbling conclusion. It was clear that what the
citizens missed most in their papers were things I had nothing to
do with creating--stock market tables, the schedules of movie
houses, sports statistics, classified advertising--and crossword
puzzles. The worst deprivation for the citizens was the crossword
puzzle. Television couldn't think of a way to provide it, and New
Yorkers found it hard to get through their morning coffee without
their puzzle.

But in the beginning, political advocacy was a newspaper's central
function--and that role still lives on in ghostly form, embodied in
the titles of certain newspapers that still exist and thrive. An
example is the paper I write for every week, The Globe and Mail,
the national newspaper of English-speaking Canada. Canadians are
so used to hearing that title, "globe and mail," that we seldom
reflect on what an odd combination of words it is. After all, the
word "globe" and the word "mail" refer to subjects from entirely
different categories. Why do they appear in the same name? Like
many newspaper titles, it's an accidental product of history.

This particular history began when one of the great men of
19th-century Canada, George Brown, founded the Reform Party, which
later became the Liberals. In 1844 he also founded a Toronto
newspaper to promote his ideas, and called it the Globe. Sir John
A. Macdonald, the national Conservative leader and the most
important politician of 19th-century Canada, later helped to start
a paper called the Toronto Mail, partly to oppose Brown's ideas.
The Mail loyally supported Macdonald's Conservatives for years but
eventually the editors began to develop ideas of their own, some of
them different from his. Macdonald was outraged, and in
retaliation he started another Conservative newspaper, the Empire.

So for a while the Globe, the Mail, and the Empire were three separate daily papers in Toronto. They were far from alone, of
course. Before 1900 Toronto, like most prosperous cities, had many
newspapers: some weeklies, some dailies, some short-lived, some
long-established. In the 1890s the Empire was among those that
were faltering. In 1895 the Mail purchased it, and took a new
name, The Mail and Empire. That was how it existed for another 41
years, until 1936, when a new publisher came on the scene,
purchased both The Mail and Empire and The Globe, and combined them as The Globe and Mail, a paper which was at first Liberal but soon became Conservative. The title still doesn't make a lot of sense.
But we who write for it are delighted the new publisher didn't call
it "The Globe and Empire," since empires have become unpopular in
Canada, and for that matter everywhere else.

The earliest of these events happened at the dawn of daily
journalism, when our profession was busily creating that new human
desire I mentioned, the hunger for news. Over a century and a
half, journalism has first stimulated this need and then developed
an international industry to satisfy it.

In recent times, the gathering and processing of news has become a
vast collective creation. Every day, journalists around the world
make millions of choices based on the data available to them and on
their own sense of what is remarkable or important. Then they pass
this chosen information along the chains of news services and
networks to other journalists who eventually convey it to the
public. Our profession has evolved into what entomologists call a
"super-organism," a mass of individual creatures with specialized
tasks, working toward a common goal. Imagine us as members of a
large ant colony. The ants appear to be working independently or
in small groups, but in fact they are all governed by powerful
rules that drive them to make something large and complicated.

The product of this intellectual labour, the news, is an
abstraction, but as soon as it exists, it turns into a form of
reality. Some three centuries ago, René Descartes wrote about
the triangle, saying there is no such thing as a triangle, it
doesn't exist in nature; but once it takes shape in someone's mind
it becomes, in a sense, "real." This is the way news works. News
does not exist on its own: facts are not in themselves news. We
must identify and shape them before they become news--that is,
become, like the triangle, "real."

Canadian journalism is a part of this world-wide collective
super-organism. It shares many of the concerns and problems of
news-gathering elsewhere in the world, but it also has its own
specific qualities. Perhaps we can examine it through three kinds
of tension, three ways in which conflicting pressures express
themselves. In their daily lives, journalists must constantly
balance opposing forces, and we often find them annoying or
distracting. Still, I don't want to suggest that they are
necessarily a bad thing. In journalism, as in most forms of
expression, the best work often emerges from the resolution of
tensions. I've often noticed that argument within the profession
is valuable: when we disagree vigorously among ourselves we are
often on the brink of making progress. Philosophy speaks of
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; in journalism, I think, our work
emerges through a similar process of persistent argument. Within
our newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting networks, and even
within certain groups of producers assigned to make a single
program, we often argue about fundamentals--what we should be
doing, why we should be doing it, how well we have done it in the
past. Those who find this tedious should go off by themselves and
try to put out a magazine or a radio program single-handedly: in no
time they will be longing for the luxury of an argument.

In Canadian journalism three persistent conflicts affect our
professional lives. An outsider would quickly identify the
English-French conflict as the most obvious, since the rise of
French-Canadian separatism threatens to destroy Canada. But in
fact that plays only a minor role in the structuring of our
journalism. It is conducted in two separate and nearly airtight
compartments. French-Canadian journalism speaks to French
Canadians, and English-Canadian journalism to English-speaking
Canadians. From time to time these two distinct divisions of
Canadian journalism may quote each other and comment on each
other's opinions, but not in a way that defines their work as a
whole. The conflict between English and French obsesses us; it
does not shape us.

The three tensions I refer to are these: between corporate profit
and professionalism; between Canada and the United States; and
between the demands of the independent ego and the needs of
community.

As to the first, most journalists are employees of large
corporations, and our work is usually organized and budgeted as
part of the corporation's profit-making system. If we look at
journalism in this way it's simply an extension of corporate
capitalism--and a valuable extension. Journalism makes advertising
possible, and without advertising much of business would dry up.
Furthermore, journalism spreads information among business people,
everything from stock-market data to theories of management.

But at the same time journalists are professionals and have
developed over the generations certain standards of professional
conduct; like most professionals they do not always meet their own
standards, but those standards are nevertheless a part of their
consciousness at all times. Journalists see themselves as servants
of the truth and servants of the public.

It is natural that these professional responsibilities will
sometimes conflict with the goals of their corporate managers; it
is natural that one side will come first on certain occasions and
the other side on other occasions. As a class, Canadian
journalists tend to identify with the welfare state, with
government intervention in the economy, with the writers of
environment-protection legislation, and with labour unions. In
short, they are committed to what North Americans call the liberal
point of view. Managers and owners, of course, often see things
differently. Sometimes it seems that capitalist owners inhibit
journalism--but in this, capitalism is not unique. The fact is,
owners of any kind can be an inhibiting force. In Canada the
largest news-gathering organization is the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. It is owned and supported by the taxpayers; the
government of Canada chooses the president and the board of
directors. Here, too, just as in a corporation in the private
sector, tension arises between journalists and their managers. In
recent years the greatest tension has resulted from budget cuts.

The government, in the name of cost-cutting, has severely curtailed
the activities of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in
television and radio, raising the suspicion that it resents the
independence of the CBC journalists and seeks to curb their
influence on the people. In the late 1990s two trends are
reshaping Canadian broadcasting. The first is the decline in
significance of the national public networks, the English and the
French versions of the CBC, due to these funding cuts and also due
to increased competition. The second is the rise in the number of
channels available in most homes. In the last twenty years they
have increased from a handful to several dozen, with more to come.
It appears we are now moving out of the era dominated by big,
powerful networks and into a period when the TV audience will be
broken into smaller and smaller pieces. In other words, the
business of television in the late 20th century is beginning to
resemble the business of newspapers in the late 19th century.

Nevertheless, government support has been crucial to Canadian
journalism, and at many points in our history, state-supported
agencies have done more than any other to focus attention on
national issues. The federal government created a state radio
system in 1932, which evolved into the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. At the beginning of the Second World War the
government also created the National Film Board, which soon became
a world leader in documentary films. CBC radio and television have
been at the centre of journalism since the 1930s, and many of our
most prominent journalists have emerged as the stars of
government-backed radio and TV. The anchorman on the CBC nightly
news is always a Canadian celebrity, and the late Barbara Frum, as
an interviewer first on radio and then on television, became one of
the leading figures in Canadian public life; when she died in 1992
the national mourning for her made it clear that she had been one
of the most beloved Canadian citizens.

As for newspapers, they are less numerous than they once were in
Canada, but they continue to show signs of economic health and in
some cases editorial improvement as well. Around the world,
newspapers have slowly come to understand that they are no longer
mainly in the business of providing hard news: most of the simple
facts of a story reach us through television and radio, long before
newspapers can get to us. Newspapers now must provide something
else in place of news, whether it's pure entertainment or a more
serious approach to information. Many newspapers have done market
research in order to answer certain crucial questions: Why are
people not reading newspapers as much as they once did? Why do
some people appear to be able to do without newspapers entirely?
I don't know how Japanese marketing people approach that sort of
issue, but in Canada we use focus groups. We gather some potential
readers around a table, we first of all trick them into believing
they are there to talk about something else, and eventually we draw
out their opinions on what we want to know about. To the most
pressing question they answer, typically, "I don't read the
newspaper because I haven't enough time."

What is amazing is that some newspaper editors (who are sceptical
about everything else) actually believe this answer. Of course it
is untrue. It is a polite fiction. Most people in North America
have plenty of time. Some have more disposable time than ever
before--time to watch movies and soap operas on television, time to
watch baseball games that stretch for hours, time to argue over the
meaning of the latest program in the Seinfeld series. The
existence of the gigantic entertainment and sports industries
proves that many people have great gaping holes of time to fill.
So the reason some have abandoned newspapers must be found
elsewhere. I think the truth is that they don't read newspapers
because they don't find them interesting and entertaining and
because they don't believe newspaper reading is important to their
lives.

The American communications theorist Neil Postman, who has been
much influenced by Marshall McLuhan, said some years ago in a
speech to newspaper publishers: "You must alter your conception of
what business you are in. .... you must be in the meaning business.
What this suggests is more interpretation, commentary, social
criticism, features. .... your point of view must be sharpened
.... You need editors who have themselves addressed the questions,
What are we here for? Where have we come from? Where are we
headed?" Postman said that these editors probably won't be found
in journalism schools. He predicted that newspapers were more
likely to find them in schools of theology.

Around 1990 The Globe and Mail became the first English-language
newspaper in Canada to recognize that the environment for
newspapers had radically changed. The Globe fundamentally altered
its emphasis. It transformed its principal content from news to
analysis and comment. At the same time, it recognized that readers
will respond to much more discussion in their newspapers of private
issues, issues of love and death and private betrayal and
disappointment--issues that once were confined to book reviews or
coverage of the theatre and movies. The Globe became more personal
as well as more analytical. The result has been highly successful.

Recently Conrad Black, the Canadian who has been the prosperous
publisher of The Daily Telegraph in England for some years,
obtained control of the Southam chain, which owns newspapers across
Canada. Many journalists in Canada viewed this as an ominous
development. Black is famous for his conservative views, above all
for his embrace of market economics, his suspicion of government,
his enthusiasm for the United States, and his impatience with
Canada's traditionally relaxed and genial approach to
French-Canadian separatism. He's an old-fashioned press baron,
with opinions he likes to express. Many feared that under his
control the Southam newspapers would be filled with his views. And
to an extent this has happened: Black's Southam papers, such as the
Montreal Gazette, now carry right-wing columnists that they would
have disdained two years ago. But the importance of Conrad Black
lies beyond opinion. What matters most about him is that he
apparently admires good newspapers, thinks they can make profits,
and believes in spending money to create them. He promises to
improve all the Southam newspapers, which in recent years had been
rather dull, and in one case he's made good on his promise. He has
vastly improved the newspaper in the national capital, the Ottawa
Citizen, in a way that echoes the Globe's changes of seven years
ago and extends those changes into other fields, such as local
news. Black also proposes to start a new daily in Toronto; if he
carries through on that idea, Toronto will have five daily
newspapers, more than any other city in North America.

Newspaper readership in Canada is lower than Britain's, which in
turn is lower than Japan's. And yet everywhere newspaper owners
are concerned about their future, particularly about readership
among young people: I notice that the Japanese Publishers and
Editors Association has a campaign with the slogan "Let's Read
Newspapers 5 Minutes More," and it has a Committee to Strengthen
the Newspaper Medium, aimed at "encouraging younger readers to stop
distancing themselves from newspapers." In Canada newspaper owners
would be ecstatic if they could achieve the readership levels you
have in Japan, but obviously the publishers here, as everywhere
else, feel they must work hard to retain those levels.

Canadian newspapers are relatively healthy at the moment, but they
are also asking themselves how long they can remain healthy. How
will they be affected by the Internet? Certainly e-mail has
already begun changing journalism. In an article published on
October 15, Keiichiro Tsukamoto, publisher of the Japanese Internet
Magazine, urged that reporters "add their e-mail addresses to their
by-lines on their stories so that readers can convey their opinions
immediately." He also expressed an idea new to me, that "reporters
... carry portable personal computers, especially at a press
conferences. Then readers could send a message to the reporters,
requesting them to ask certain questions."

I'm not sure that would work. At a press conference, most of us
are already nervous enough about asking useful questions, without
worrying about what questions are suddenly popping up on the
screens of our laptops. But I agree entirely with the idea that
the e-mail addresses of reporters should be published with their
work. In Canada a number of journalists, mostly columnists, do
this now. My own e-mail address appears with my column every week
in The Globe and Mail, and I can tell you after two years that it
substantially changes the business of writing a column. One change
arrives swiftly--you become even more anxious to avoid mistakes,
because if you make even a small one there's a reader somewhere who
will tell you about it at 10 o'clock of the morning of the day the
column appears. Another change is the amount of mail. I normally
receive 20 letters for a column that would have attracted three or
four letters before e-mail. Sometimes I receive forty or fifty.
Often they are quite brief, helpful little notes, saying something
like "You should read this book." Usually readers wouldn't bother
sending a letter to make such a brief comment, but it's easy to
send an e-mail. It's also easy to reply to e-mail, since the
physical work involved is simple and quick. I find I'm now much
more polite about replying to my readers quickly. I've also
discovered that many e-mail letters are long and thoughtful. They
help to educate me so that I'm better prepared when I return to the
same subject later. I just wish they had invented e-mail in the
1960s, when I was writing six columns a week for the Toronto Star,
the largest newspaper in Canada. I can't imagine how much e-mail
I would have received under those circumstances. And of course,
writing six columns a week would have given me a chance to publish
many of my readers' letters.

But the economic question still faces us--will the Internet replace
the daily newspaper printed on paper, the object we hold so easily
in the subway or over breakfast?

My answer is: Not soon. My generation, and probably the generation
now in middle age, will likely remain addicted to the newspaper.
However, I can imagine a fundamental change. If a generation is
reared with computers as part of ordinary life, and if there is
eventually an Internet connection up and running most of the time
in most homes--that is to say, if it can be switched on as easily
as the phone or the radio--then I can imagine that the Internet
will take over many of the economic functions and some of the
editorial functions of the newspaper, perhaps eventually all of
them. Possibly newspapers will begin moving their activities to
the Internet, eventually letting their paper editions decline and
slowly fade away at some point a few decades from now. Possibly
some of the people here today will in middle age read the news via
Asahi On-Line or Yomiuri Digital.

In the meantime, however, I would agree with Keitaro Oguri, the
managing editor of the Asahi Shimbun Tokyo head office, who
addressed this subject a few days ago in his Newspaper Week
message. He argued that "the more diversified the means of
information transmission, the more their survival hinges on the
substance they provide." He cited investigative journalism as work
of value that newspapers can offer. I would also say that
newspapers should emphasize their greatest historic strengths,
which include literary style and the ability to convey information
through powerful narrative. Incidentally, I also agree with
Keitaro Oguri's general advice to editors and reporters. He said,

"I recommend astute optimism. Stare reality in the eye, deal
sternly with injustice, and do not forget to exercise a sense of
humour."

Astute optimism: I don't know how that phrase was first written in
Japanese, but in English translation it seems to me just about
perfect.

In Canadian journalism, to return to my central topic, a second
focus of tension is the relationship with the United States. On
one level, Canada's relationship with the U.S. resembles
Japan's--it is an example of one-way internationalism. In Canada,
our mass media steadily report on American affairs, political,
economic, and cultural; in the United States the mass media do not
report on Canadian affairs at all. Much the same imbalance exists
between Japan and the U.S. In Japan we can see on television or on
the front pages even minor events in the life of the American
president, for example; but in the U.S. Japan appears on the
television news only when there is a disaster or the possibility of
a trade war. Canadians and Japanese, and many others, may claim
this demonstrates that Americans are provincial in their outlook,
and that's not entirely wrong. Certainly Americans tend to ignore
foreign countries, whether close by, like Canada, or a great
distance away, like Japan. Furthermore, it appears that in matters
of culture Americans have grown less interested in foreign
countries than they were a few decades ago. Daniel Bell, the
eminent American social scientist, has made the point that even
American intellectuals no longer consider it important to know
about the current novelists of Italy or France; and those who pay
careful attention to the film world are painfully aware that the
once-vibrant appreciation of international cinema on the university
campuses of the U.S. has now largely disappeared.

I think I understand some of this. I've come to the conclusion
that this attitude results from the vastness of America itself.
Within its own borders, the United States is a huge and amazingly
diverse empire, in which all varieties of humanity exist in one
form or another, and in which most of the languages of the world
are spoken by sizeable groups. The Americans find this world of
their own so large and complex and engrossing that they have
difficulty looking beyond it to other worlds, such as Canada's or
Japan's. I grasped this for the first time when I attended an
international conference in Hungary in 1985. At that conference
publishers of books from countries such as Rumania, Denmark, and
Portugal complained that there was no equality in their publishing
relations with the United States. They consistently translated
American books into their languages, but the Americans hardly ever
translated books into English from Rumanian, Danish, Portuguese,
and so on.

The Americans listened to these complaints with sympathy but
without comprehension. They have so many titles of their own that
they feel no need to look for titles elsewhere. Why should they?
And the same applies to television: they produce so many programs
that they don't need even to glance at the programs of foreign
countries. So we are left with this situation: the whole world
watches American television, but America never watches the
television of the world; and there is not one American in a
thousand who believes this fact is even noteworthy.

In these ways the experiences of Japan and Canada with the United
States run parallel. But in another arena, no parallels exist:
that is, in the information marketplaces of the two countries. In
Japan, Japanese-owned newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting, in
the Japanese language, control all but a tiny fraction of the
market. In Canada, the situation is much different. Switch on the
television in English-speaking Canada and you will discover that
half or more of the programs are American. Visit a news-stand and
you will find that far more than half of the magazines available
are American. Canadians own their own newspapers and radio
stations, partly because of government regulations; but in general,
the cultural marketplace is dominated by the Americans. This means
that in English-speaking Canada the ordinary citizen lives,
culturally, on at least two levels, following American events like
an American and Canadian events like a Canadian. A French-Canadian
who can use the English language with ease, as many can, may be
thinking on three levels at once: as a Quebecker, as a Canadian,
and as an American, or at least a resident of North America tuned
into North America's mass culture.

The U.S.-Canada relationship helps create another serious problem
in our journalism: to a remarkable degree, we rely on foreign
sources, principally American, for foreign news. If there is a
crisis in Indonesia, for instance, most of the coverage that
reaches the Canadians will come through American news services, and
to a lesser extent British and French services; only occasionally
will Canadians receive foreign news from Canadian reporters on the
scene. This means that what we know of the world is filtered
through the sensibilities and opinions of Washington and New
York--and sometimes London or Paris. In this sense, our journalism
remains immature, and it's hard to see any prospect for
improvement. For instance, Canada has many close economic
relations with Japan, and cultural relations as well; but the
Canadian media at the moment do not employ even one full-time
correspondent in Tokyo. If there is a major event here, some
Canadian media will send their own reporters; but most will rely on
the Americans, the British, and the French. If asked why,
newspaper editors will cite costs, but in fact newspaper profits in
many cases are at record levels. Perhaps the real reason is a lack
of curiosity, a provincialism very like the provincialism of which
I have today accused the Americans.

The third source of tension in Canadian journalism that I want to
describe arises from the conflict between the individual ego and
the requirements of the community.

One theory of journalism has it that our most vital function is the
creation and maintenance of the sense of community. This theory
arose in the American West, when towns were being built in the
midst of wilderness. People would come together, establish the
beginnings of government, and perhaps start a school; then someone
would create a newspaper, and that would provide the community with
a sense of identity and distinctiveness. It would also draw the
people into the larger community--in Canada that meant the province
first and then the nation. This is one way that collections of
individuals turn into societies. We can still see it at work in
the mass media today: if people accept a television network or a
newspaper or a magazine, then they are on the way to accepting the
rules of a society.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the greatest theorist and prophet of
democracy, wrote in 1833 that in a secular society government must
persuade everyone that they serve their private interests by
voluntarily joining their efforts with the efforts of all others.
And, he wrote, "That cannot be done habitually and conveniently
without the help of a newspaper." But he also said, "A newspaper
can survive only if it gives publicity to feelings or principles
common" to large number of citizens. And finally, "A newspaper
always represents an association whose members are its regular
readers." Much the same applies, 164 years later, to everything
from radio stations to chat-rooms on the Internet. All of us long
for community, and we do our best to find it in our mass
media--even, sometimes, in tabloid journalism.

Tabloids came late to Canada. In 1971, long after most of the
western countries had developed tabloid journalism, we acquired our
first daily tabloid, the Toronto Sun. An older broadsheet
newspaper, the Toronto Telegram, a survivor of the 19th-century
party press, died in 1971, and the next day a few of its former
employees started their own tabloid. They really didn't know how
to do it, since not one of them had ever worked for ten minutes on
a tabloid paper in the U.S. or Britain or elsewhere, but slowly
they evolved a new way of finding a public. They broke the most
important rule I learned as a young journalist, which was: never
write about yourself. The people at the Toronto Sun not only wrote
about themselves, they dramatized themselves, they made themselves
into heroes of independent journalism. They published a paper
about publishing a paper, and they did it in such a slapdash,
casual way that their new audience quickly developed an affection
for them. One columnist wrote about his hangovers, another about
her boyfriends, the columnists all wrote about each other, and when
the editor had two heart attacks and a by-pass operation he wrote
a six-part series on his experience. When the editor decided to
run for election, six or seven Sun columnists wrote about his
campaign. He failed even to get a party nomination, but he and the
other journalists had an exciting time--and so did the readers.
The Sun was like a TV situation comedy, all about a zany bunch of
journalists putting out a zany newspaper. They were personal and
emotional, and soon they were fabulously successful. They caught
something in the air, perhaps a need for cosiness and
sentimentality, perhaps the same need that was demonstrated in the
recent wave of affection over the death of the Princess of Wales.
And on this basis the Toronto Sun became the first new daily
newspaper firmly established in North America in more than three
decades, a phenomenal performance. Today it flourishes still, with
satellite newspapers in three other cities. At the beginning I
disliked it, and I dislike most of it to this minute; but obviously
the editors who created it knew something I didn't know about the
desires of the public. What they produced was a kind of antidote
to urban alienation, the basis for a form of community.

Why, then, is there tension between the individual and the
journalist's life in the community? Because, I think, that is the
nature of human relations, and we see it played out more directly
in journalism than elsewhere, as we constantly balance our own need
for self-expression with what the community needs from us. We all
develop as individuals, but we find satisfaction in our relations
with others. The self grows in freedom and independence, but must
be fulfilled through community--in "the interplay," as the great
critic Lionel Trilling puts it, "between an awareness of the self
that must be saved and developed, and an awareness that the self is
yet fulfilled only in community."

Our profession, which feeds on the tumultuous nature of public
affairs, is itself in more or less constant tumult. We are at the
mercy of swiftly developing electronic technology, abrupt changes
in ownership, and the vagaries of public taste. Those who have
persisted in journalism know that there's rarely a time when we are
not under some form of dire threat. Jane Jacobs of Toronto, a
journalist who became a great theorist of city life with her book,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, says: "Let's remember
that it's always the best of times and the worst of times."

Somehow in the midst of this tumult we manage to deliver to the
citizens a reasonably complete and reasonably independent account
of reality. If we do accomplish that, it is certainly not because
of the stability of our institutions. It must be because our
profession attracts enough individuals who believe it is worth
their while to find out the truth and make it both public and
coherent, whatever the obstacles in their path.

It seems natural to end this discussion of my profession, and
particularly my profession in Canada, on a personal note. My
father was a news editor at a wire service in Toronto. As a little
boy I watched him work and heard him talking about what he did. I
remember thinking, when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, that
if I too could be a journalist, and if I could do it well enough,
then perhaps my whole life would be made interesting. Amazingly,
that's more or less how it turned out.